Yale — Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature — 24. Censorship

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Lecture 24 - Censorship [April 14, 2011]

Chapter 1. Two Modern Examples of Plato on Censorship [00:00:00]

Professor Tamar Gendler: So our topic today is the general question of what sort of non-rational persuasion is legitimate for a government to engage in if we're willing to accept the kind of social contract argument that we were considering in the last few weeks of the course. So you'll recall that starting with the account of justice that's offered in Plato's Republic, and continuing with the account of the state of nature that we get in Hobbes, each of our authors has suggested that it is in our self interest, in a way that we would reflectively endorse governmental structures, to give up some of our freedoms in order to guarantee a certain sort of stability.

But the sorts of constraints that we considered in the earlier discussions of this concerned explicit laws. They concerned ways in which we contract into regulations that we recognize as holding upon us, and that we endorse because we see the rational reason for contracting into them. The argument that Hobbes makes appeals to the notion of The Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a paradox of rationality. It's a problem that arises when self interests conflict in particular ways and interact with incentives in particular ways.

What we looked at, at the end of last lecture, and what we'll look at in today's lecture are the ways in which human beings are complex. They have, as we know from our early lectures, not only reason but also parts of their soul which are affected by things other than reason. And that, too, turns out to have implications for what political structures end up being rational for us to endorse.

In particular, what we'll look at in today's lecture, is on the one hand Plato's argument that in the ideal state there would be rather radical censorship of what sort of fictional representations were permitted, and Cass Sunstein's argument that one of the duties of the government is to establish norms that affect people implicitly in how it is that they structure their behavior.

So in the context of a lecture on this topic it seems appropriate to begin with a couple of stories. True stories about false stories and their effects. So in 1992, right around the time when many of you were being born, there was also born on television a young boy who was born to a television character named Murphy Brown. Now that's not in itself newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that Murphy Brown at the time was unmarried. Indeed she didn't have a long-term partner. And the then-Vice President of the United States, Dan Quayle, famously gave a speech in San Francisco in 1992 at which he said,

"Marriage is a moral issue that requires consensus and the use of social sanction. It doesn't help matters when prime time television has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent highly-paid professional woman, mocking the importance of a father by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice."

Now in fact Dan Quayle slightly misrepresented what happened on the show. Murphy Brown, though she lacked a long-term partner and did bear a child without the support of a second adult figure, didn't call it just a lifestyle choice. But he was correct in that the show did not go on to depict in any way what the costs were to Murphy Brown's life of having to reconfigure her life in a way that she became a caregiver.